Stories About Choosing a Simple, Ascetic Life

March 4, 2024 6:26 PM

[Book Recommendation Filter] I would like your recommendations for memoirs and personal diaries written by people who made a conscious choice to live a more ascetic life, and in turn discover how to better appreciate simple, but meaningful, pleasures.

Please try to limit recommendations to memoirs/personal diaries/journals only, but I'll take a good novel, too, if you insist on it.

For those wondering, I've got most of the better-known transcendentalists covered, as well as Annie Dillard; I'm still open to whatever you want to throw at me.

Bonus points if the person writes about living this way while still being part of a larger family or social system where the people around them strongly derive their personal inner value from wealth, and don't understand the person's choices or lifestyle.

posted by nightrecordings to Grab Bag (27 answers total)

It's more of a project than a lifestyle but Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach covers some of this. She had to reconcile being alone and facing mortality (and nature) for an extended period of time with the impact of sharing life with others.

There's no wealth angle. More from the opposite direction of what you are looking for, she does note differences between her literary background and what she finds in rural Maine.
posted by aworks at 7:10 PM on March 4, 2024

I'm going to try to shoehorn the cookbook/memoir "Honey from a weed" by Patience Gray into that category.
posted by jade east at 8:20 PM on March 4, 2024

I have yet to read it myself but I wonder if The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton might fit your list.
posted by sigmagalator at 8:39 PM on March 4, 2024 [4 favorites]

"How to Cook a Wolf" by M F K Fisher. She writes about eating and cooking on a time of great paucity... specifically during WW2. A lovely book. Although she didn't choose to live this particular way, it was thrust upon her and she tells us how she did it with great success.
posted by Czjewel at 10:00 PM on March 4, 2024 [4 favorites]

White Goats and Black Bees: A Year in the Life of Two Americans Who Bought a Farm in Ireland by Donald Grant

I Bought a Mountain by Thomas Firbank. Canadian becomes Welsh sheep-farmer in 1930s

The Worm Forgives the Plough by John Stewart Collis. London literatus becomes farm labourer in WWII

Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran Irish American graduate becomes Zen monastic in Japan

Cacophony of Bone Kerri ní Dochartaigh an (un)intentional lockdown year collecting feathers and bones in a micro-cottage in the Irish midlands.

To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. The first part of her life was spent with deeply rural rellies in West Cork
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:58 AM on March 5, 2024

I'm not sure if it counts, Country Women is a manual written by women about homesteading (published in 76), but it has journal entries from one woman throughout the book. It's about her divorcing and going to live in a tent by herself in a very rural area for years.

I wouldn't call it inspiring exactly, but it was honest and interesting. I found myself skipping ahead to the next journal entry.
posted by Eyelash at 3:20 AM on March 5, 2024

Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money is a classic of this genre. I first read it decades ago and was inspired. I just now discovered there is a documentary.
posted by bricoleur at 3:54 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

Two other authors well worth mentioning: Bradford Angier and John Seymour.
posted by bricoleur at 4:01 AM on March 5, 2024

The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (translated by Ida H. Washington) - a family had to flee Germany in the run up to WW2, and after hopping around a couple major cities, ended up living on a farm in Vermont. The book came out of a series of long letters Alive wrote to her mother-in-law, explaining what life was like for them.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:02 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing
posted by sagwalla at 4:09 AM on March 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

The first half of Into the Wild covers Chris McCandless's move away from a comfortable middle class college lifestyle to living as a drifter. He does fine at it as well, until it all goes wrong in Alaska. There are extracts from his diary and he has many views on how to live an ascetic life.
posted by el_presidente at 6:13 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

I must recommend We Took to the Woods, by Louise Dickinson Rich. It is the autobiographical account of a woman who raises a family in the deep backwoods of Maine in the 30s. Rich's voice is unique and entertaining, and the tales she tells of dealing with the hard winters, gathering a literal boatload of blueberries to can for the winter, and other stories, is engaging enough that I have read the book more than once.
posted by cleverevans at 6:47 AM on March 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

Along with the above recommendation for Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, you might also appreciate The Sign of Jonas, which is his diary/memoir of day-to-day life in the Abbey of Gethsemani, written soon after he entered the monastery.
posted by jquinby at 6:50 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

This might not be exactly what you had in mind, but I would recommend a wonderful essay called "On Dumpster Diving", by Lars Eighner. The author spent a few years being homeless and then wrote a memoir titled, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets. The Dumpster-diving essay is a chapter from his book. Here's an excerpt:

Many times in my travels I have lost everything but the clothes I was wearing and Lizbeth [my dog]. The things I find in Dumpsters, the love letters and ragdolls of so many lives, remind me of this lesson. Now I hardly pick up a thing without envisioning the time I will cast it away. This I think is a healthy state of mind. Almost everything I have now has already been cast out at least once, proving that what I own is valueless to someone.

Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy—we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.

I am sorry for them.

posted by alex1965 at 6:56 AM on March 5, 2024 [4 favorites]

Gary Rogowsky's Handmade checks a lot of these boxes. I learned about it from Jenny Odell's work, which also may be of interest.
posted by activitystory at 7:20 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

One more - it occurred to me just now that The Genessee Diary by Henri Nouwen might also fit the bill.

Since you mentioned Annie Dillard, so I'll also plug The Outermost House by Henry Beston.
posted by jquinby at 8:03 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'll throw in a fiction rec: Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. A perfect book.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:08 AM on March 5, 2024 [3 favorites]

I really liked and was inspired by Learning True Love by Chân Không.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:23 AM on March 5, 2024

The people interviewed in The Abundance of Less are very inspiring.
posted by JanetLand at 8:50 AM on March 5, 2024

I think Kerouac's Dharma Bums wins the OP's bonus points, he's unrolling his sleeping bag outside his folks' house when he could easily sleep on the couch, but he eschews those bourgeoisie pleasures. And later he gets that job watching for forest fires. Also Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark wrote a novel-memoir about heading north into the Canadian wilderness to get away from it all called The Eden Express but then discovers his schizophrenia.
posted by Rash at 9:29 AM on March 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

Just throwing it out there in case the description appeals: the short novel A Month in the Country, about an English soldier returned from WWI to a smash of a life who goes to work on restoring an old church fresco, camping in the steeple for want of funds. Sounds like it could be horribly twee, but not at all. It also feels like it was written decades before its actual publication date of 1980. I didn't adore it, mind you, but there's a lot in there about the spartan life he is obliged to adopt and the work he falls in love with.
posted by praemunire at 10:59 AM on March 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

I also thought of A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland. There's more about this book on UK websites.
posted by sagwalla at 4:27 AM on March 6, 2024

Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms is a story of a road trip the author took after a cancer diagnosis. She leaves her regular life behind and spends months outside her comfort zone visiting friends, family and strangers. I found it moving and inspiring.
posted by bendy at 2:53 AM on March 7, 2024

I have a relatively contemporary recommendation about living a simple but good life amidst conspicuous consumption and late stage capitalism. The Art of Frugal Hedonism is memoir and guide book in its style of writing.
posted by pipstar at 3:09 PM on March 7, 2024

Mod note: [btw, this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 4:12 AM on March 11, 2024

Masanobu Fukuoka's "The One Straw Revolution" and
Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time to Keep Silence" both fit the bill and they are both short, and concise.

Though not quite what you're looking for, "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula le Guin is a compelling (sci-fi) critique of consumerism, militarism, extractivism, etc., and is also a quick read.
posted by nikoniko at 12:29 AM on March 12, 2024

David Budbill was a poet living in a "remote Vermont hermitage" and his work in the latter part of his career fits this description, I'm very fond of the collection While We’ve Still Got Feet.

Two Views Of The Same Place

People say, Oh! it must be relaxing
to live up there on your mountainside
People say, It's so laid-back up there

Yeah, well, it's off to The City for me
when I want to find some relaxation.
I wander the crowded streets, ride

the subway, eat exotic food, and
for a moment flee these thousand
thousand mountain cares.
posted by jeremias at 4:52 AM on March 12, 2024